Turtle-Shaped Pistachio Cardamon Macarons

If you follow me on Instagram, you would already know that I've been obsessed with making macarons. For the past few months, that has been my favorite thing to bake. I taught myself how to make macarons over this COVID-19 pandemic so I can thank the pandemic for that. It has been so much fun playing with different flavors and everything has turned out great so far. My all time favorite flavor is still pistachio or any combination with pistachio in it.

Today, is another cool summer day and I was in the mood to bake. I so happen to have baked macarons yesterday too but oh well. Lol. It was a different flavor! I'm feeling more and more confident and I wanted to try some macaron designs. There are so many cute designs online that I swoon over but I needed something fairly simple so that I don't totally fail on the first try. Ha! Since I love pistachios so much, I decided to do something green and a sea turtle seemed easy enough.

Before Baking

After Baking

After adding paint. How adorable are these?

I love my little turtle macarons! They cracked a bit at the top because I didn't let them fully dry but I actually think the cracks made them more turtle-like. It gave them character so yay! Today, I'm actually feeling a bit like Kim-Joy from the The Great British Bake Off. She creates the most adorable looking desserts. I'm not nearly as good so I like to copy the best. Kim-Joy rules!

I tinted my whipped meringues with green and a bit of yellow. I added about 1 tsp of cardamon to the dry ingredients and 1/2 tsp of cardamon to the filling as well. I started piping the turtle bit by bit so that it had time to spread and dry before I added more. I think that is the most important part because you don't want to end up with a big undistinguishable blob. To simplify things, I think next time I would just pipe rounds for the bottoms of the turtles. That would facilitate matching them up and then they would lie flat as well. So using half the batter, I would pipe out turtles and with the other half of the batter, pipe rounds roughly the same size as the turtle's shell. If you are looking for a recipe, you can try my pistachio matcha macaron recipe and just omit the matcha part.

Sea turtle macarons sunbathing.